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[droqen]

i read brkla's "designing avoiders"

after spending a large amount of time with my own gameplay (forever), in a sibling sort of genre.

brlka's writing belongs to a very common canon of game design writing that focuses on something i will tentatively call 'player experience'.

excerpts from "designing avoiders" will follow, accompanied by commentary.

[droqen]

short, arcadey mini-games about avoiding obstacles in claustrophobic spaces.

brkla defines "avoiders" as having certain qualities:
- "short", describing a quality of the average player experience
- they are "about avoiding obstacles", describing the purpose of them in terms of the actions which the player undertakes
- "claustrophobic spaces", describing the spaces in terms of how they feel to the player (claustrophobic space can be used loosely as a synonym for tight space, but carries a psychological connotation)

[droqen]

mechanical descriptions interlaced with experiential descriptions:

hazards that move around and threaten the player

- "hazards that move around" describe a thing that can be defined in code.
- "threaten the player" is a feeling ('threat') delivered to the player.

A player-aware hazard that chases the player is easy to avoid, while player-indifferent hazards can often be ignored if you're standing still; mix the two, and the chasing hazard will force the player to move and engage with the other hazards.

- "A player-aware hazard" and "player-indifferent hazards" are defined earlier in mechanical terms; their movement is or is not influenced by player position (even here, 'indifferent' as a word carries a whiff of intentionality or sentience)
- "easy to avoid" describes the (subjective) difficulty of a player action
- "force the player to move and engage with" describes the player's action as reactive, animated by the game -- player as object, rather than subject (the game forces the player to move, rather than the player moving)

Avoiders should demand the player's attention

^an even more explicit framing of the game animating the player.

[droqen]

In an angel dances in the sparks of a bonfire (aka angel game), a timer spawns two sparks, then resets to a random interval between one and zero. The result is uneven, unpredictable clumps of sparks - sometimes massive, dense waves, sometimes a sparse handful. This feels very different! It isn't fair, but it's fun.

the above contains a textbook-order example of the MDA framework.

MECHANICS : a timer spawns two sparks, then resets to a random interval between one and zero
DYNAMICS : The result is uneven, unpredictable clumps of sparks - sometimes massive, dense waves, sometimes a sparse handful.
AESTHETICS : This feels very different! It isn't fair, but it's fun.

[droqen]

(end of examination of brlka's post.)

[droqen]

when i'm 'playing' gameplay (forever), i am having a complex subjective experience that comes from countless interacting things, both internal and external.

i think that i am writing this thread because i have found that descriptions of aesthetics (in the MDA sense) is not very useful to me as a player, as a designer, as an appreciator, or as an artist.

this is not a new idea.

i believe the philosophical term that is most commonly used to refer to these things that are useless to describe is "qualia".

[droqen]

there is something missing.

[droqen]

a high degree of reliance on qualia
- devastates the foundation of design discourse (todo: link to mcdonald's definition of design)
- is or seems to some degree necessary because of the immense complexity of games (todo: link to conversation with jw)

[droqen]

Design includes:

• A shared set of practices and techniques
• A public discourse about its values, goals, innovations, and limits
• A canon of existing examples and counterexamples
• A worldview that differentiates design from other kinds of activities
• A pedagogy that brings new practitioners into the community.

from ROMchip Presents: Peter McDonald on The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play (timestamp 44:59)

[droqen]

I guess the way you can look at gameplay objectively is like the entire possibility space throughout the entire game at once or something? to me that's 4d/5d brain shit I can't do

from Jan Willem Nijman's bleet

[droqen]

it is common for game designers to rely on qualia-based shorthands when referring to player experience, which is devastating to many of the concrete features that mcdonald proposes as key to what design is

(that is, if we agree that design is, or benefits from, or involves "A shared set of practices or techniques", then qualia-based shorthands like "X threatens the player" weakens design by weakening the sharedness of these practices or techniques because what it means for "X to threaten" varies from individual to individual in a way that categorically cannot be bridged in certain ways)

and, it is common for game designers to rely on player experience (either real experiences - i.e. from playtesting - or imagined/constructed experiences - from intuition) to navigate "the entire possibility space" of a game system. as jw puts it, "that's 4d/5d brain shit I can't do".

despite my response on bluesky in which i said "that's how i think about it yeah"... i relate.

[droqen]

i would really like to think about "the entire possibility space throughout the entire game at once".

i theorize that part of the enjoyment of computer games is dancing with the impossibility of such complexity, and the moments in which one feels that a total understanding is even remotely within reach.

in The Impossible Reversal (mcdonald), the titular concept is related: there is a kind of play or pleasure that requires reversal of a seeming impossibility. first, something must seem impossible, and then one discovers its possibility. such a sensation cannot ever be realized without, first, the sensation of impossibility.

[droqen]

(no conclusion.)

[droqen]

UPDATE: it was the next day (still august 2) and i was cleaning the kitchen while listening to jack crawford's video, '10 Games to Play If You Have No Idea What I'm Talking About'.

jack is describing the mechanical differences between Ghosts 'n Goblins and LURRUNA, and at timestamp 15:49, says, of LURRUNA:

[15:49-] You're just a little bit too powerful.

prior this statement (and after it), the things that he's saying are a lot more factual, mechanical, what have you.

[15:54-] The two action games in my mind that are great examples of limiting your movement, limiting what you can do, slowing you down, things like that, so that you're forced to play more predictively, rather than reactively. You're forced to think ahead, right, you're forced to anticipate things, and understand how the enemies work, more than just, like, react to them. [-16:16]

this felt related to the brlka breakdown above. there's a whirlwind of terms along the MDA spectrum being thrown around here, and i think a few of these terms, lost in the whirlwind, cause certain design discourses to become difficult to have in a way that is not necessary.

"too powerful", "play more predictively, rather than reactively"

something about these words is very slippery...

my interest is not in pointless criticism of semantics, but to explore different ways of communicating and thinking about playable systems in ways that might yield valuable results. earlier in the stream jack is also describing having trouble with perfectionism and seeing how small projects turn out and being dissatisfied with them and starting over... perhaps part of this (common) problem is that the creative field of 'game' design is not well constructed on any foundation?

[droqen]

but the reason i even took notice of this kind of language is that it was a shift away from another type. prior to descending into this use of language jack describes a number of mechanics in great detail, and i felt as though it was going somewhere else -- somewhere clearer where i'd like to identify and be able to go myself:

[14:19-] In Ghosts 'n Goblins you have walking and jumping, and your jump has a total of three arcs. It has the full right, the full left, and the straight up.

[In LURRUNA] you can adjust your jumps in mid-air . . . you have this low, fast, long jump, . . . you have this super crazy high backflip . . . you have a different backflip that [goes] pretty high up and pretty far backwards. . . and that gives you a lot of dodging options.

Then compared to any single weapon in G&G [Ghosts 'n Goblins], you get a lot of coverage with . . . the different arcs that you can throw these bombs [in LURRUNA]. I feel like any potential angle that an enemy can come at you from, you're not going to have to wait that long, or do that much positioning work, or thinking about your positioning and all that kind of stuff to get into a place where you can hit something. [-15:33]